Geopolitics and the Vietnam War: Pyrrhic Victory's Antonym

If pyrrhic victory had an antonym, it would describe a loss with dramatic yet unanticipated benefits, a victory disguised as defeat. This essay's central assertion is the Vietnam War was a geopolitical victory for the United States. The war was a victory disguised as defeat. Nicholas Spykman's analysis of the United States' geopolitical position in America's Strategy in World Politics is applied along with older and post–Cold War Vietnam War historiography. Saul Cohen's maritime conception of the Cold War is also employed. The 1965 American ground force intervention in Vietnam geopolitically secured Indonesia in the Western strategic-economic orbit in the Cold War. The unanticipated benefit, making the Vietnam War pyrrhic victory's antonym, is the intervention's role in the movement of the Sino-American relationship from that of enemy to rapprochement to tacit alliance in the 1970s. This movement illustrates a recent historiographical assertion the war intensified communist bloc fractures beyond repair, reoriented international politics, and made a major contribution to the US Cold War victory.     

Satire and Geopolitics: Vulgarity,Ambiguity and the Body Grotesque in South Park

Humour and laughter have become the subject of recent geopolitical scrutiny. Scholars have explored the affirmative and liberatory possibilities of humour, and the affective bodily dimensions of laughter as tools for transformative action in critical geopolitics. Humour that is vulgar and politically ambiguous is yet to be explored as a potent geopolitical avenue of enquiry. Studies of satire have suggested that rather than contesting entrenched geopolitical beliefs, satirical shows can serve to further divide audiences both amenable and antagonistic to the satire in question. I argue that this should not involve a wholesale rejection of satirical shows, as humour that uses irony, subversion, and other discursive techniques is just one way satirical media becomes an effective commentator on political issues. I examine the show South Park and argue its satire combines bodily and scatological humour with more traditional satirical techniques to produce a comedy that ridicules contemporary issues by reducing complex politics to the most basic and crass condition possible. This is defined in a Bakhtinian sense of the body grotesque, a social inversion through reference to the common bodily functions of all human beings.     

Security and Fear: The Geopolitics of Intimate Partner Violence Policing

This paper builds upon feminist critiques of security interventions in the name of ‘protecting women’ to link United States municipal policing practices for intimate partner violence with global security interventions. Policing intervention into intimate partner violence emerged in the last twenty-five years; however as I argue, these policing practices are situated within narrow conceptions of masculinist security that often fail to address victims' multiple security needs. While not dismissing the importance of arresting intimate partner violence abusers, this paper examines the ways that policing can create additional and different embodied fears and insecurities for victims. Using the tools of emotional geopolitics, this paper traces victims’ fears following the arrest of their abuser to understand the temporal and spatial moments of fear in relation to security interventions. This methodological approach examines the limitations of masculinist protection while reimagining security to consider the emotional security needs and fears of those being protected.     

Space and the Atom: On the Popular Geopolitics of Cold War Rocketry

This paper considers the imbricated domains of space exploration and Cold War geopolitics by following the trajectory of the ‘Corporal’, the world's first guided missile authorised to carry a nuclear warhead. It examines the popular geopolitics of rocketry as both a technology of mass destruction and as a vehicle for the transcendent dreams of extra-terrestrial discovery. Avoiding both technical and statist accounts, the paper shows how these technologies of Cold War strategic advantage were activated and sustained through popular media and everyday experience. Particular attention is given to such mundane activities as children's play, citing the example of die-cast miniature toys of the Corporal. Through such apparently modest means, nuclear weapons were made intelligible in, and transposable to, a domestic context. The paper is also situated within a wider emerging literature on geographies and geopolitics of outer space.     

Counter-Factual Geopolitics: President Al Gore,September 11th and the Global War on Terror

In this paper, a counter-factual geopolitics is addressed with specific reference to the US presidential election of November 2000. What difference would it have made if President Al Gore had been confirmed as holder of that office rather than George W. Bush? Would we have had a very different kind of response to September 11^th for example? By focusing on some of the speeches and remarks given by Al Gore, we consider how a different strategy might have emerged following that momentous event. It is contended, however, that despite what the anti-Bush critics might have wished for, the geopolitical and spatial consequences of a Gore administration might have differed only on tactics and strategies rather than fundamental principles. By way of conclusion, the paper considers how counter-factualism might contribute to the further development of critical geopolitical scholarship.     

Popular Geopolitics,Audiences and Identities: Reading the ‘War on Terror’ in the Philippines

Audience research has traditionally been neglected within the subfield of popular geopolitics. However in recent years, geographers are increasingly focusing on the making of geopolitical meanings by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts. Drawing on recent assemblage thinking in geopolitics, this paper argues that audiences form part of the animators of a network that links the human body with places, environments, objects and discourses related to geopolitics. By investigating Filipinos’ critical readings of and engagements with the ‘war on terror’ in Mindanao as represented through the national newspaper, the Philippines Daily Inquirer, the agency and power of audiences in the creative enactments of geopolitics and geography are illuminated. As such, understanding the complex interactions between popular media and its audiences can prove useful in casting insights into the everyday, geopolitical ‘playing out’ of issues of terrorism, violence and peace in the Philippines context and beyond.     

The Domestication of Geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim Conflict and the Policing of Marriage and the Body in Ladakh,India

This paper approaches intimacy as a site of geopolitical practice. What happens when the body is the territory through which geopolitical strategies are played out? In the Leh district of India's Jammu and Kashmir state Buddhist/Muslim conflict is articulated at the site of the body and geopolitical strategies impinge on personal decisions. Over the past century religious identity has increasingly taken on political meaning in Leh, particularly since the 1980s. Interestingly, for average Ladakhis political conflict is described in terms of bodies – that is, through discussions of who should or should not eat together, get married, or have children. By destabilising the global geopolitical scale, we can arrive at a richer and more nuanced understanding of the everyday ways in which our bodies are incorporated into or reject incorporation into geopolitical strategies to control territory.

In the past, the Buddhists were more. Now, it's the Buddhists, mostly, I think, who have used family planning. Among the Shia Muslims, if you look in Kargil and Chushot, even now, they have nine each or eight each. Rinpoches say that our Buddhists are getting fewer, and then our Hill Council, in the future it's going to be run by Shia Muslims. What the Buddhist Association did, it said to all the Buddhists, “You should think. Up to four, or up to six, or up to five, let them be born. Don't sterilize after two.” (Yangdol, 45-year-old Buddhist mother of three) ¹ 1. Names of research participants have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout. Yangdol uses here the term “Balti,” to refer to Shia Muslims. In Ladakh the terms Balti and Kache are frequently used to distinguish between Shia and Sunni Muslims. These terms however, are somewhat misleading as they are geographic markers – Balti means a person from Baltistan and Kache means Kashmiri. These terms are regularly applied to Ladakhis to denote their religious identity, but in my interviews I have found it is more common for Buddhists to deploy these words and that Muslims more often differentiate using the terms Shia and Sunni. In later interviews throughout this paper I have translated Balti and Kache as Shia and Sunni, however, I have bracketed the term to indicate this substitution. A rinpoche is a high monk, generally the reincarnated spiritual leader of a particular monastery. Kargil is the district to Leh's west, dominated by Shia Muslims, and Chushot is a Shia-majority village that meanders along the Indus River, just southeast of Leh.

In the beginning, in the very beginning, the relationship was very good. We were like one person. There were Buddhists who married with Muslims, and Muslims who married with Buddhists. Now, times have changed, and things are different. Now people don't understand, and they have bad hearts. (Razia, 45-year-old Sunni mother of two)     

Pressure and Protection: Cold War Geopolitics and Nation-Building in South Korea,South Vietnam,Philippines, and Thailand

This paper compares the failures and successes of nation-building in South Korea, South Vietnam, Philippines, and Thailand between 1954 and 1991. The primary argument is that several key elements of Cold War geopolitics interacted with each other, and the unique external and internal politics of each regime, to create divergent frameworks and margins for error that influenced the willingness and ability of each state to assume the burdens of nation-building. In all four states, moreover, the success of nation-building depended on finding the right balance between geopolitical pressure and protection to augment local narratives of security, nationalism, and legitimacy.     

The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture

This paper considers the film Behind Enemy Lines, made before 11th September 2001 but rush released soon after, as a cultural and commercial product which provides insights into American geopolitical culture. It argues that the movie's storyline is an articulation of a Jacksonian tradition in American geopolitical culture involving a drama of remasculinization. It also argues that the film is a mythic rendition of morally ambiguous American military engagement with the Bosnian war. Finally, it examines the film as an expression of the structure of feeling of post-9/11 American militarism. That structure of feeling is characterized by impatience with the pragmatics of multilateral diplomacy, and strong desire for the pleasures of the unilateral action and morally righteous violence.     

Rooted in Violence: Civil War,International Trade and the Expansion of Palm Oil in Colombia

Internal armed conflict severely inhibits economic growth according to a prominent set of civil war literature. Similarly, emerging scholarship finds that civil war inhibits processes of economic globalisation which are argued to produce economic growth. A case in point is international trade, which is reportedly stymied by intra-state war. In contrast, this article employs a critical theoretical framework which acknowledges the often violent tendencies of globalised capitalism. By analysing Colombia's palm oil industry, this article argues that civil war violence can facilitate international trade. In the case study which is presented, violence perpetrated by Colombia's public armed forces and right-wing paramilitaries has enabled the palm oil sector to enter and compete in the globalised economy. This includes processes of forced displacement, which have acquired land for palm oil cultivation, and violence directed at civil groups deemed inimical to the interests of the palm oil sector. By employing a micro-level approach, this article attempts to isolate violent trends related to palm oil cultivation in Meta, the largest African palm-growing region in Colombia. An attempt is therefore made to give an empirically informed account of how violence in Colombia's civil war is facilitating palm oil exports.     

Cartopolitics,Geopolitics and Boundaries in the Arctic

Critical Border Studies emphasise how distinct political spaces are produced by borders. In this article I suggest that the order of this relationship should be reversed. I argue that space precedes and conditions the manifestation of borders. The argument is based on an understanding of cartography as a practice that mediates the relationship between space and borders. Drawing on Bruno Latour, I introduce the notion of cartopolitics to describe the process where questions pertaining to sovereign control over space are decided through cartography and law. In analysing current border practices in the Arctic, the term cartopolitics captures how the relationship between the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and cartography is shaping the attempts by Arctic states to expand sovereign rights into the sea. The key is the continental shelf and how it is defined in law. In this process cartographic practices work to establish a particular spatial reality that subsequently serve as a basis for border making.     

Undead Spaces: Fear,Globalisation, and the Popular Geopolitics of Zombiism

In recent years, zombies have enjoyed a dramatic renaissance in various forms of popular culture. This essay argues that the current obsession with the walking dead, and particularly the looming threat of human-zombie conflicts, is a reflection of the dangers of invasive alterity associated with uncontrolled spaces in a globalised world. This shift is especially prevalent in the United States following 9/11, as zombies have become phantasmal stand-ins for Islamist terrorists, illegal immigrants, carriers of foreign contagions, and other ‘dangerous’ border crossers. Through three case studies which examine zombie ‘outbreaks’ on the local, national, and global levels, respectively, I discuss the importance of borders and geopolitical spaces in recent fictional depictions of human-zombie conflicts. As metaphors for illicit globalisation, zombies have emerged as a key pop-culture referent of the porous nature of socio-cultural, political, and physical boundaries in a global age defined by an emotional geopolitics of fear.     

Synergy Goes to War: A Bioeconomic Theory of Collective Violence

Synopsis Synergy – here defined as otherwise unattainable combined effects that are produced by two or more elements, parts or individuals – has played a key causal role in the evolution of complexity, from the very origins of life to the evolution of humankind and complex societies. This theory – known as the ‘Synergism Hypothesis’ – also applies to social behavior, including the use of collective violence for various purposes: predation, defense against predators, the acquisition of needed resources and the defense of these resources against other groups and species. Among other things, there have been (1) synergies of scale, (2) cost and risk sharing, (3) a division of labor (or, better said, a ‘combination of labor’), (4) functional complementarities, (5) information sharing and collective ‘intelligence’, and (6) tool and technology ‘symbioses’. Many examples can be seen in the natural world – from predatory bacteria like Myxococcus xanthus to social insects like the predatory army ants and the colonial raiders Messor pergandei, mobbing birds like the common raven, cooperative pack-hunting mammals like wolves, wild dogs, hyenas and lions, coalitions of mate-seeking and mate-guarding male dolphins, the well-armed troops of savanna baboons, and, closest to humans, the group-hunting, group-raiding and even ‘warring’ communities of chimpanzees. Equally significant, there is reason to believe that various forms of collective violence were of vital importance to our own ancestors’ transition, over several million years, from an arboreal, frugivorous, mostly quadrupedal ape to a world-traveling, omnivorous, large-brained, tool-dependent, loquacious biped. The thesis that warfare is not a recent ‘historical’ invention will be briefly reviewed in this paper. This does not mean that humans are, after all, ‘killer apes’ with a reflexive blood-lust or an aggressive ‘drive’. The biological, psychological and cultural underpinnings of collective violence are far more subtle and complex. Most important, the incidence of collective violence – in nature and human societies alike – is greatly influenced by synergies of various kinds, which shape the ‘bioeconomic’ benefits, costs and risks. Synergy is a necessary (but not sufficient) causal agency. Though there are notable exceptions (and some significant qualifiers), collective violence is, by and large, an evolved, synergy-driven instrumentality in humankind, not a mindless instinct or a reproductive strategy run amok.      

German,British and French Geopolitics: The Enduring Differences

Geopolitical discourses for Germany, Britain and France are outlined for several periods since 1870. They are also categorised as to their orientations to different scales (regional, European, global). These discourses remain different over time. Differences are interpreted in terms of situation, state age and state organisation. At the same time these discourses change on the basis of state system characteristics and mutual interactions.     

Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom,Identities and Audiences

This short and hopefully provocative paper serves as both a retrospective of the past twenty years of critical work on so-called popular geopolitics and also an impetus for a more theoretical connection to related areas within cultural studies, such as fan studies. An overarching theme of the history of popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse, which is only now beginning to shift towards audience interpretation, consumption and attachment. This shift in focus parallels a similar move in cultural studies made several years prior. Therefore, this paper advocates combining theories from cultural studies with empirical studies of concern to popular geopolitics to further our understanding. Specifically outlined as a possibility in this paper is the viewing of nationalism and religion as forms of fan-based identities, in that both can be understood as adherence to serial narratives. This perspective carries several corollaries regarding methodology and object of study, most notably a concern with the making of geopolitical meaning by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts.     

The Three Critical Flaws of Critical Geopolitics: Towards a Neo-Classical Geopolitics

Critical geopolitics is the dominant school of geopolitics in contemporary geography. Critical geopolitics is a body of radical scholarship that emerged in the 1980s that attempts to move beyond classic geopolitics. In order to resuscitate geopolitics, critical geopoliticians had to distance themselves from the imperialist, racist, and environmentally determinist geopolitics of the 1940s. In doing so, however, critical geopoliticians created a body of scholarship that omits important explanatory variables necessary to understand post–Cold War geopolitics. We argue that critical geopolitics unnecessarily limits the wider application of geopolitics because it is: 1) anti-geopolitics; 2) anti-cartographic; and 3) anti-environmental.